


Memoriam

by starcunning (Vannevar)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Day of the Dead, Established Relationship, FDNH Apocrypha, First Do No Harm, Gen, Mei is mentioned, Multi, Post-Fall of Overwatch, if you squint there might be some Mercy/Mei in there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 14:37:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8450218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vannevar/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: She sounds like a stranger, Mrs. Maria Reyes, and she shouldn’t be, not for all the time Gabriel used to spend talking about her—her and her mother, the women who raised him. She can’t be a stranger; Angela has heard her grief fill churches, wailing over a coffin she’s been told holds her son. She has seen a United States Army officer present her with a folded flag and watched her clutch it to her body, points pressed to her hunching shoulders like epaulets, and this not so very long ago.“Who is this?” Maria’s voice comes, sounding faintly alarmed, and Angela realizes she’s been sitting there in silence.





	

The first time it happens, Angela Ziegler is sitting in her office in Bern, not eating her lunch. The new-paint smell is oppressive; the sterility not the kind she’s used to. She is thinking about the memo in her inbox telling her they’ve finally cleared away all the rubble in Geneva. She wonders what will become of the former Watchpoint. The nurses’ stations are bright with bowls of discounted candy. Angela looks at the photos of what used to be Overwatch headquarters, and before she knows it she has pulled up a next-of-kin list. It still exists only because some agents are still in the field. She considers it before her, the last part of Overwatch: its obligations. The line rings in the duotone that means she’s called North America.  
“Hello?” comes the voice on the other end, thick with sleep. “Hello?” she says again.  
“Hello,” Angela says, fingers locked around the handset. “Am I reaching Mrs. Maria Reyes?”  
“Yes,” says the other woman unsurely.

She sounds like a stranger, Mrs. Maria Reyes, and she shouldn’t be. Not for all the time Gabriel used to spend talking about her—her and her mother, the women who raised him. She can’t be a stranger; Angela has heard her grief fill churches. She has witnessed her wailing over a coffin she’s been told holds her son. She has seen a United States Army officer present her with a folded flag and watched her clutch it to her body, points pressed to her hunching shoulders like epaulets, and this not so very long ago.

“Who is this?” Maria’s voice comes, sounding alarmed, and Angela realizes she’s been sitting there in silence.  
“I … this is … Doctor Angela Ziegler,” she says. “I knew your son.”  
“Gabriel?” she says. There’s a note of hope in her voice. “Is this about him?”  
“Yes,” Angela says, hesitantly. Then, again, “yes.” Because what else could it be about? “He used to call you on this day,” she says, words coming slow through the veil of memory.  
“Not at three in the morning,” says Maria Reyes, and hangs up.

— — — — —

The second time, the pain is less raw, and Angela hates that it is. She wouldn’t dare to call again, except that last winter she sent a notecard to Los Angeles. Against expectation, she got one in response: direct, blunt, reminding her of the gulf of time between Switzerland and California. Angela sits at her kitchen table, the sun long since set, and listens to the line ring.  
“Hello?” says Maria Reyes.  
“Hello, Mrs. Reyes. This is Doctor Angela Ziegler. Is this a good time?”  
“Better,” says Maria, laughing until she coughs.

Angela feels a twinge of something. Pity or guilt, perhaps. She has never cared about patents: only lives. She wants to do something about that cough, but the last time she treated a pair of lungs belonging to a Reyes …  
“I wanted to call you,” the doctor begins.  
“You remember Gabriel,” Maria says, the humor draining from her voice. “They buried him,” she says—  
“I was there—”  
“They buried him in the back pages of the news reports.”  
“These days,” Angela says, “perhaps that’s a kindness.” She sounds tired. She is tired. They bury her too, but the press picks like vultures at the corpse of Overwatch, so Gabriel’s invisibility sounds like a boon.

“My son was a hero,” Maria Reyes insists.  
“I know,” Angela says.

— — — — —

“Hello, Maria,” Angela says. “It’s Doctor Ziegler.”  
“You keep calling,” Maria says. “Every year. Why?”  
_I know what it’s like, waiting for someone you love to call you; knowing they never will,_ Angela thinks. She resolves to see her parents that weekend; to hire a car and sit a while before the stones. She wishes she could go to Los Angeles, but there’s no catharsis waiting for her in America.  
“Someone should,” Angela says.  
“Now you’re thinking you don’t know what to say.”  
“I never do,” Angela admits. “Not at the funerals, and not afterward. When he called you, it was always in Spanish.”  
“We would talk about his father,” Maria says.  
“He passed, didn’t he? When Gabriel was young?” Angela asks. “He told me that much.”  
“And about his _abuela._ ”

Angela remembers that night: Gabriel sitting in the middle of the bed, speaking low and fast in Spanish while she and Jack made helpless eyes at one another. She holds the image in her mind of him rushing out of the bedroom for the tarmac. She remembers their lamentations, now so crushing in hindsight, that they didn’t have a Slipstream ready to take him to his grandmother’s bedside. She had felt a faint pang of envy, then, over his getting to say goodbye to someone he loved so much, but not afterward. There was no armor in the world against that kind of pain.  
“You would talk about the dead,” she says.  
“Yes,” Maria says. “You want to tell me about Gabriel? This is the day for that.”

“I did everything I could,” Angela begins.  
“You said that three years ago.”  
“I need you to believe me,” she insists. “I did everything I could for him because Gabriel wasn’t just another patient, not just another member of Overwatch. He was my friend,” she says. “He was my friend, and I loved him.”  
“That is about you,” Maria says, too gentle to be really scolding. “Tell me about Gabriel. What do you remember?”

“I remember his smile,” Angela says. “He did it so rarely, it was like bestowing a gift. Jack could get him to do it more than I could. They loved each other.” The words tiptoe out of her mouth.  
“I know,” Maria says.  
“He would cook for us sometimes. I’d try to help, but he would tell me that wasn’t how his grandmother did things and turn me out,” Angela laughs. “He would let Jack make the cocktails,” she says.  
“He loved Overwatch,” Maria says.  
“I know,” Angela murmurs.  
“He joined the Army because I couldn’t send him to college, so he thought he could go that way. Took courses online, you know? When they picked him for the program, he was so proud, and Overwatch …”  
“Was everything to him,” Angela says. Her cheeks are wet. Sleet falls in the November night.

— — — — —

The next year, Mei is in the next room, insisting it’s not too late to watch some old monster movie, and teases Angela about calling her girlfriend.  
“Hello, Maria,” she says.  
“Hi, Angela. How did the recipe turn out?” Maria Reyes asks.  
“I may have burned it,” Angela admits, cheeks hot. “So maybe he was right to kick me out all those times.”  
“The movie people called me earlier,” Maria says.  
“To tell you they remember him?” Angela sounds skeptical.  
When Maria laughs, she doesn’t cough anymore, so at least Angela got that right, in the end. “Do they?” the older woman wonders.  
“They remember a very different Gabriel Reyes than I do,” says the doctor. “But they want us involved, those of us that are left. I won’t let them push him to the back,” she promises. “Mei—Doctor Zhao—and I will be visiting Hollywood soon. You should come with us to the meeting.”  
“What will you tell them?” Maria wonders.  
“That your son rooted for the Raiders win or lose, but the sport I called _football_  he didn’t care to recognize,” Angela laughs. “That one year at the Halloween party he fell into the apple-bobbling tub and Winston had to haul him out. That he always had a word of encouragement for Ana Amari’s daughter; that he taught Jesse McCree the best of what he knew. That he did his best to go unseen, but I saw him anyway. That it was worth it. That your son was—”  
“A hero.”

— — — — —

His childhood home is brighter than he remembers: a fresh coat of paint; newer appliances. His mother could have moved out, gone somewhere better with the wages he had sent home, not to mention what the holovid rights must have paid. But she seems content to live the rest of her life here.

It’s late afternoon in Los Angeles, and the day is warm; the air is laden with fragrance and music. His mother is elsewhere, clearing the debris from a grave that bears his name but does not hold him. It is a good day for the dead to walk unnoticed.

The notifier blinks: one new message. He’s ready to ignore it, unsurprised they want an interview, except: it displays the caller’s name. _Angela Ziegler._  His thumb slams the retrieval button so hard he hears the bones snap. There’s pain, but it’s meaningless; his cells regenerate, knitting him together.

“Hi, Maria. It's Angela,” she says, sounding slightly unsteadied. He hates the sound of her voice, and how long he’s gone without hearing it. “I suppose … I’m calling a little late. Things have been strange here.” _Strange like I should have killed you,_ he thinks, in the space between her words. “Anyway,” the doctor sighs, “here’s a story about Gabriel: I didn’t think he wanted me at Overwatch at first. I wasn’t sure I wanted to join a paramilitary organization, either, but I wanted to save lives. I could do that, there. He didn’t want to put me in the field not knowing how to defend myself, so he would drag me from my lab to the firing range every morning.  
“I hated it. I didn’t want to know these things. That frustrated him, perhaps, and I didn’t understand it at first. But Overwatch wasn’t just an organization, just a team, it was a family, and he made me part of it. I hated knowing the things he taught, but they kept me alive, and they were worth it. We were so different, had so little in common other than our purpose. I would never have blamed him for seeing nothing else. But in the end I needed him, and the world is less, for being without Gabriel Reyes.”

He can hear the quaver in her voice. He wants to feel nothing but hatred, but he’s come here to try and feel anything else.

“He wanted what was best for me,” she says, “so I gave him the best _of_ me, and—forgive me—I never thought much about life after death, but I hope he knows that. I did the best I could for him, not just on his last day but every day before that. I remember your son,” she says. “I hope the rest of the world does, too.”


End file.
